'Early strikes wouldn't have prevented Sept 11'

He and other top officials of the Bush and Clinton administrations told the national commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks that eliminating bin Laden, invading Afghanistan or bombing al-Qaeda training camps in the months leading up to the attacks would not have prevented them.

"Even if bin Laden had been captured or killed in the weeks before 9/11, no one I know believes it would have prevented 9/11," Rumsfeld told the commission at a hearing.

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The plot had already been set in motion and the attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people would have been seen as retaliation for any US strikes, the officials said.

Rumsfeld and his predecessor William Cohen as well as Secretary of State Colin Powell and his predecessor Madeleine Albright, were questioned about why they had not taken more aggressive action against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan before Sept. 11.

There were at least four potential opportunities to try to kill bin Laden in Afghanistan from December 1998 to July 1999. Cruise missile strikes were prepared but never approved for fear of civilian casualties and because of doubts that bin Laden would still be there when a missile landed hours later, a commission staff report said.

One of those opportunities came in February 1999 when intelligence reports pinpointed bin Laden near a hunting camp in the Helmand province of Afghanistan used by visitors from the United Arab Emirates.

CIA officials told the commission that policymakers were concerned that a strike might kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials who might be with bin Laden or nearby.

The commission staff report said one CIA official "believes today that this was a lost opportunity to kill bin Laden before 9/11."

Cohen, who was defense secretary under President Clinton, reminded the commission that when that administration bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998 that it believed might help bin Laden acquire chemical weapons, it met a lot of public criticism that it was a mistake. He said he would do it again.

Cohen also said bin Laden had issued a "fatwa" or religious decree to have him killed. "I was put on a list, there was a price tag, there were several attempts, that I don't want to go into details about, going after me," he said.

Bin Laden has managed to elude US forces and those of its allies, who have been hunting him for years.

Rumsfeld said before the attacks he knew of no intelligence that al-Qaeda was planning to hijack planes and crash them into buildings in the United States.

Powell told the hearing: "Most of us still thought that the principal threat was outside the country.

"Anything we might have done against al-Qaeda in this period or against Osama bin Laden may or may not have had any influence on these people who were already in this country, already had their instructions, were already burrowed in and were getting ready to commit the crimes that we saw on 9/11."

Albright said she and other officials would have been prepared to kill bin Laden from the time of the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Africa until the day Clinton left office.

The testimony followed a weekend bombshell by Richard Clarke, a former counterterrorism official under both Bush and Clinton, who said the Bush administration did not take the al Qaeda threat seriously before the attacks and then focused immediately on trying to link the strikes to Iraq. No definitive proof of such an Iraqi link has ever emerged.

Clarke and CIA Director George Tenet will testify before the commission on Wednesday.

National security has become a prominent political issue leading up to the November presidential elections. Democrats accuse Bush of giving the terrorism threat too little weight and focusing too much on Iraq. Republicans say the Clinton administration did too little to combat al-Qaeda.